11:00 AM
BOB:
We have a five-plus hour drive ahead of us. We have about a two hour cushion that we’re pushing, so it should be a leisurely drive through some mountains and shit. Tyler has been an awesome host. He even made us some pretty fine (for a white white-boy) Mexican-ish food for dinner last night.

1:30 PM
BOB:
So far, the drive is nice. I had driven from Boise to SLC before, but don’t ever recall seeing the Great Salt Lake or the Salt Flats. The shit is impressive.

3:13 PM
BOB:
Now I get it. Apparently there is a reason I didn’t see the Salt Flats and Salty Lake it’s because we took a wrong turn right in the heart of SLC and are now 100 or so miles off course. We’re in fucking Nevada. I’ll let the clips tell the tale:

Confessions of an Austin Weirdo

Posted By: Amanda Farrell-Low

07/21/2010 8:00 AM

If you missed the most excellent roller derby doc Hell on Wheels when it came through town as part of 2008’s Victoria Film Festival, here’s some good news: Austin filmmaker Bob Ray is back in town with his acclaimed account of the revival of all-female roller derby in his hometown of Austin, as well as his latest feature-length documentary, Total Badass.

Badass tells the story of Chad Holt, a guy who lives up to Austin’s motto of keeping it weird. He’s a pot-slanging sex-addict who raises prize guinea pigs, sings in bands with names like Front Butt, writes a highly offensive (but entertaining) magazine column and has a part-time job cleaning grease traps at local restaurants. He’s intelligent, fearless and tragically flawed; when we first meet Holt, he’s finishing up the last few months of a five-year probation sentence for a huge scam involving forged South by Southwest music festival bracelets, and he seems hopelessly addicted to whatever drug is within arms length. But you can’t help but grow to love the guy; despite the fact that he can’t seem to go five minutes without fucking up, it’s obvious he’s devoted to his son and stepdaughter, and is forced to figure his shit out after his son’s mother’s house gets foreclosed on and he has to take care of the kids—which means moving out of his friend’s garage.

Ray follows Holt around on his daily routine: selling pot, checking in with his prohibation officer, getting dirty text messages and getting high. At one point, Ray hands the camera over to Holt to film himself, and we see his life really spiral out of control, raiding a dead woman’s medicine cabinet and snorting a whole lot of blow.

In Hell on Wheels, Ray managed to stumble upon an engaging story just before it exploded and followed its stranger-than-fiction trajectory from day one. To a lesser extent, Total Badass achieves the same thing; we see Holt struggle to shake off his skeletons and vices when he has to provide a stable life for his family. And while this documentary is probably a lot more interesting to people from Austin who know Holt, it still has some genuinely funny and touching moments.

Hell on Wheels and Total Badass will be screened at 7 p.m. (Wheels) and 9 p.m. (Badass) Monday, July 26 at the Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad. Tickets are $10 per film or $15 for both and director Bob Ray will be in attendance. Visit crashcamfilms.com for info.